The last true mystery of September 11, 1973, a mystery more eschatological than historical, is Salvador Allende’s last speech. About the rest, we know almost everything there is to know: a trial launched in 2011 to determine whether the President was assassinated or committed suicide has ultimately clarified a host of details that may yet be outstanding; Even the names of the officers who entered La Moneda that day are already known.
Some still don’t accept the idea that the President committed suicide. A murder would be better to simplify the story; above all, to turn it into a military failure and not a political one. The one who initiated this lineage is Fidel Castro; later endorsed by García Márquez. The family maintains an ambiguous and prolonged silence, possibly due to their multiple ties to Castroism of the time. Years later, Castro will tell Hugo Chávez, also besieged in the Miraflores Palace, not to imitate Allende’s gesture, surrender and not uselessly sacrifice himself. He, of course, tells someone who would never imitate him, the commander who is about to die begging for another hour of his life. We have already received a confession from each other: For Castro, Allende’s suicide was a useless sacrifice. It’s odd: Allende, who exposed himself only once in a ridiculous pistol duel, knew politics could cost one’s life; Castro, who displayed it all the more clearly in the Sierra Maestra, seemed to forget it.
After the facts, the speech remains. Accusing, lyrical, with dramatic volumes, changes in tone, mood swings, breath of life and at the same time sad. Improvised, but one of those improvisations “that one often rehearses in the shower,” as a witness told me the moment he said it. We know that Allende was a great orator, a 1960s Senate virtuoso populated by swordsmen of the word. But that’s different. It’s a death speech. death and eternity. These two things come together only in religious thought.
In his book Salvador Allende. Political scientist Daniel Mansuy writes in The Chilean Left and Popular Unity (Taurus, 2023) that Allende’s speech left “a poison and a mystery”. I suspect the poison is political: on that day, the Chilean road to socialism, an electoral path marked by majority appeal and respect for the law, failed. It’s more than the Chilean way, it’s Allende’s way. Nowhere has it succeeded. He contradicts the entire revolutionary line that prevailed in popular unity and in his own party, the Socialists. It moves away from the freeze-frames of Marxist theory, from the simplest, the Soviet, and from the most elaborate, the foquista, the insurgent or Trotskyist. And he stands in stark contrast to the hero of the Latin American left, once again Fidel Castro, who is about to show the wear and tear of his own. Recall that the year Allende took office, the harvest of 10 million tons failed in Cuba, leaving Cubans exhausted and Castro outraged.
As Jorge Edwards wrote, Castro viewed history as nature and nature as history, both of which were susceptible to being shaped by violence. For Allende, on the other hand, the two things have something indescribable: the doctor knows that nature is indomitable, and the senator that history is enigmatic: “People do it.” The peoples, not the heroes. In its last hour, history becomes only future; He gave up the gift.
At that moment, Salvador Allende invents his own spirit and lets it roll through the country: “You will continue to hear me,” he says, “I will always be with you.” The spirit punishes “morally” those who overthrow it. And he uses “la patria,” that term that has never been comfortable in Marxist culture. There is no word for the left, nor for national unity, nor for its party. You must have given some thought to this omission. To define himself, he does not say “socialist” but only “interpreter of great longings for justice”. Years later, Régis Debray will write in cozy Paris: “The revolution is not a homeland.”
Poison Extends Its Reach: Why Did the Chilean Route Fail? Because it was never possible or because many prevented it? Which weighed more: the actions of the enemy or the lack of conviction of the allies themselves?
I come back to Mansuy’s phrase: the poison and the riddle. The mystery remains for us. Here we enter the stormy terrain of political morality. Why kill a besieged man who is not doomed to inevitable death? Why does his spokesman, the sarcastic Perro Olivares, threaten to forestall him and shoot himself in the head in a hallway? Agree, a political act does not have to be a collective suicide. But it is simply that the people’s unity does not exist in La Moneda or in its surroundings; La Moneda is only defended by those who work at La Moneda. The Secretary General of the Socialist Party, Carlos Altamirano, flees to seek refuge and takes incredible risks to go into exile. Altamirano doesn’t like Allende’s performance either, let alone his speech. She is not a mobilizer, she does not call for resistance, she does not look at the ground beneath her feet: she only looks at history. What does “The people must defend themselves, but must not make sacrifices” mean? Nothing! This is not a guide!
Every socialist will have his own opinion from that moment on, and almost no one will be able to express it honestly. The discourse turns everything into eschatology. The left begins by analyzing what brought popular unity and the president into this situation; The process that we know as socialist renewal began, unexpectedly spearheaded by Carlos Altamirano abroad. Inside, the sharp self-criticism of Tomás Moulian and Manuel Antonio Garretón underscores the incompatibility of the Chilean way with its minority status, or at least with an inadequate pooling of forces. Both sociologists note that the left despises the middle class, without which no majority can be achieved, and has ignored the development of the Chilean state in the 20th century, which has become mesocratic rather than oligarchic. The revolutionary pole, and the MIR in particular, have not even examined these things as they are obsessed with determining what phase of the revolution we are in.
Allende has not done the theoretical homework. it’s not your thing He was just trying to convince his teammates, but his teammates kept closing the door on him. Until the last day. Allende has no other solution than to break with national unity, but this is almost more painful for him than the other end. This is another unexplored rarity: why on the left does mere discrepancy always sound like treason, why do so many capitulate to what is left stamped, even if it is a monstrosity?
By omitting the unity of the people from his speech with his cunning as an orator, Allende also invents an uchronia: things didn’t have to be the way they were. And once they are what they were, there is no other way out than the final act, the shot. Does it seem like a lot? Sure, that’s a lot. It’s not a gesture that encourages moderation; It’s not a call for calm.
Uchronia has enormous potential: if, while Castro was beginning to fail, Allende succeeded, what would happen to all of Latin America, what would happen to the Montoneros, Tupamaros, the ERP, Tupac Amaru, the ALN, the world of Che? And in Europe, Africa, Asia? What would happen to ETA, IRA, Red Brigades, Lotta Continua, Baader-Meinhof…? Nobody imagined this break in time. At least nobody wrote it.
Mansuy notes that the most outspoken analysts, including Moulian and Garretón, run out of political language when they come at the right time. You can’t find a way to analyze it. The exhausted language suddenly becomes Christian, religious, redemptive. The sacrifice, the Holocaust, the self-immolation: Words found in the Bible, not in Capital.
But this hermeneutic error has a problem: Allende has announced it many times, publicly and privately, in speeches and conversations. It’s not a last minute decision. He tries to say that while his colleagues refuse to negotiate with him. Not only do they disobey him, they don’t believe him either. Three days earlier, Erich Schnake estimated that the President was “exaggerating the dangers.” The PS, the Mapu, the MIR regard generals and admirals as “safe informers”… who will later be the leaders of the coup! No one will later guess this botch, this mockery in their own nostrils.
Allende exaggerates and no longer threatens: he begs, pleads. His pride as a doctor, minister, senator, freemason, republican and president prevents him from saying he sees the abyss. He insists that he is in control of the situation, that he has it all in his pocket… He doesn’t admit that no one is paying attention to him. “You must make a choice, President,” Patricio Aylwin told him. “You can’t be with God and the devil.” Allende pretended not to be listening and changed the subject. This selective deafness is indicative of his political paralysis. Aylwin interprets it as obstinacy. Both things are true, but more the first than the second.
In the repertoire of those responsible for the putsch, popular unity is enormous. But Allende is not exempt, he couldn’t, no matter how much he is the first victim. It is very difficult for the left to accept these things, but until they do so, as Mansuy writes, “they will not be able to have a history of popular unity worthy of the name.” It will be tied to an indecipherable myth and the connect new generations with it. President Boric, for example, often quotes the Allende of myth, the disembodied Allende already a ghost in a burning palace, an abstraction that repeats the inspired phrases of his last speech, with no historical legibility, no volumetry.
That’s the riddle: is self-immolation an exaggerated act, or is it the only answer to his political loneliness as Chile teeters on the brink of civil war? We know that the President resents this idea; He’s said it many times too. And he knows some of his supporters are very upset about this; He treated her as “irresponsible and cowardly”. But does Allende then represent the martyrdom of social justice by peaceful means, or is he the scarecrow of a program that was never feasible?
Mansuy has fulfilled the task of the intellectual and made it clear to the left – to which he does not belong – that another intellectual task awaits him. Word which, as we know, is derived from intelligere: to understand. What commemoration is possible without understanding?
Lest this be mere praise, I would just like to say that I wish Mansuy had devoted his appendix with commentaries on other books to those that strike me as the best and most insightful: Salvador Allende, A Time in Black and white, the almost untraceable and extremely sharp text by Alejandra Rojas; Allende and the Chilean Experience, by lawyer Joan Garcés, perhaps the most rigorous truly Marxist analysis; and Salvador Allende, a sentimental biography by journalist Eduardo Labarca, which is commonly misconstrued as a gossip chronicle, despite being the book that brings us closest to Allende alive.
Mansuy’s work joins those books that one would always call necessary.
Speech by Chilean journalist and winner of the National Journalism Prize 2021, Ascanio Cavallo, at the presentation of the book “Salvador Allende. “The Chilean Left and Popular Unity” by Daniel Mansuy on Wednesday 17 May at the Universidad de los Andes in Santiago de Chile